I upgraded my Mac OS X from Tiger to Leopard yesterday. Overall I got nice things to say offset by one big honkin’ rant. Read on if this may concern you in the near future.

First off and most notably, it took a long time. I mean over an hour to just upgrade the OS – not counting installing all the development tools and running the software updater to get fresh patches. Probably two and a half hours door to door. I don’t remember the Tiger upgrade taking so long. However I do applaud that the installation disk verifies its own integrity before installing. You don’t want a bunk disk failing during upgrade thereby trashing your current installation. So after upgrading, restarting, installing more crap, restarting, installing patches, restarting and finally upgrading the firmware in my Airport Extreme/Express units, I was apparently good to go. So I did some looking around to make sure some of my crucial settings were still in place.

Cue the rant…

I had made some custom modifications to the firewall – opening up certain ports to accommodate certain things. So I went looking for that to make sure all was well. First I found that the firewall settings are no longer to be found where they were. I tracked them down under the “Security” pane in System Preferences. They re-did things a bit and here is what I saw:

So first off, the firewall is disabled by default. And that is so not OK. Next off, what do those other options actually mean? Especially the second and third options? Are they independent or do they work in tandem? I did some poking around and found an excellent discussion that shed a little light on the subject. First off, “Block all” does not actually do that. It sort of does. So, most importantly, hit the Advanced button and enable Stealth Mode. Then it actually functions like a proper firewall. You want this enabled for whatever mode you want to run the firewall in. But what if you want to open up ports for specific apps? Well, then that’s what the third option is for. When you run in this mode, if an app (a torrent client, doing point to point file transfers using a chat client, etc) attempts to start up on a port and accept connections, you will get a dialog box asking if this is OK. So one may allow or deny certain services through the firewall. Unfortunately, when you shut down the app in question, the firewall does not close the port. Moreover, it’s rumored that the OS digitally signs the apps that it opens up the ports for, so if they change – it all breaks. A for effort security-wise but D for execution.

Point one: what the fuck Apple? Leaving the firewall disabled by default? What gives with that? Point two: I get trying to streamline exposing pinholes in the firewall, but what reason is there to remove a power-user option to configure port exceptions manually? Not many people need to use it, but the ones that do need that. The feature existed in Tiger, so why remove it? Argh! So yeah, if you upgrade, tidy up that firewall. The link above give a more in-depth discussion of what’s going on under the hood. God bless the people that have the drive and the time to tinker and write it up for the rest of us.

So after I got done frothing and foaming about the firewall issue, I got down to tinkering around with all those nifty new features. Gotta say, pretty slick at points. Apple has a video that goes over much of it (worth watching if you upgrade) but some comments of mine:

The hacks to the finder – the new Cover Flow browsing mode coupled with Quick Look – are really nice. Plus the whole Stacks thing (another desktop/finder tweek) also looks really slick and could be potentially very useful for re-organizing the messy desktop. I just watched the video of those features and giggled and the sheer Apple-y-ness of the finder hacks. Spotlight is quite a bit faster now and it really speedy if you use it as an app launcher – so you Quicksilver users may not need that anymore. The iChat app has lots of multimedia eye candy jammed into it. Meh. Use Adium instead. Preview got a facelift and a bunch of nice (most PDF oriented) features added as well. The terminal no longer lets you set an image as a background. Boo to that. The Mail app got a slew of new cool features. I like the Notes and To Do features – the To Do notes also tie into the iCal app and that is slick. Notes take any sort of media you care to jam into them and can get all the sticky notes off of one’s desktop. The mail reading window has some neat additions – if there is something in the body of the email that looks like an address or email address or chat handle, it makes it easy to suck it right into the Address Book app. Nice job with that.

However, as a long time UNIX user, I’m mostly stoked about having real native virtual desktop support (Spaces) rather than having to rely on the other ones that have their problems. They even mapped the desktop movement hotkeys to Control-Arrow – just like we did it back in the day. Spaces is hands-down my favorite thing about the new upgrade. Furthermore, Spaces plus the Growl notification app is a win.

I’m not going to go on about all the new features since you can read about that anywhere. Overall, It looks like a worthwhile upgrade and it went painlessly. It just takes a while to accomplish it all, and the sins with the firewall left a bad taste in my mouth that has not gone away yet.

Cheers all.

I guess blogging is about bleating your opinions out into the void and I have a burning opinion so here goes. It’s a rant about music equipment, so if that’s not your cuppa, you can stop reading now.

When I started doing some music playing again, I wanted to get kitted up for some computer recording and (bass) guitar playing with the following constraints: 1) not spend a fortune as this is really ultimately hobbyist stuff; and 2) I live in an apartment so I have both noise and space constraints so an amp was basically not feasible. By the nature of the signal, basses tend to carry and irritate the neighbors. Originally I thought about just playing through my computer and use the effects and such from either GarageBand or Logic, but that was really prohibitive, and didn’t give the control of having pedals to dis/engage while playing. Something else was needed.

A friend hipped me to Line 6 – a company that specializes in effects and amplifier “modeling” technology. The had a product called the Bass PODxt Live – all of their bass amplifier models and a selection of effects built into a pedalboard. It also had a USB interface for just plugging right into your computer to direct record. Seemed like a reasonable way to go. Bang for your buck, headphone jack for practicing and all I needed was a USB cable to interface it with my (Logic-based) recording and mixing setup. My initial experience playing around with it was positive as I started practicing again, and I also ended up picking up one of their Variax basses (a bass guitar with similar modeling technology that mimics the sounds of a variety of bass guitars).

Then I started getting down to doing some actual recording. That’s when things went bad. The honeymoon is over and I am now basically done with Line 6 and the spotty quality control across their product lines.

First off, the USB interface was really not very well suited for direct recording. The interface was only 16-bit and 24-bit is really the way to go. Especially with bass signals I think – 24-bit just has so much more life and resonance to it. No big deal. I ended up picking up a PreSonus FireBox – a 24/96 firewire-based recording interface. Nice little piece of equipment. But getting any decent sounding recordings was really very inconsistent. A nice tone that I had whipped up from scratch using their off-board editing software (which was cool) either sounded lifeless and flat, had crap recording levels, or just plain didn’t sound the way it did when I programmed it.

Other problems emerged as well. For some unknown reason, whenever engaging a modulation effect (such as a flanger or phaser) it would cut the signal drastically. So, if one wanted a setup where one would engage and disengage a mod effect during the song (something I do like to do) one was sort of out of luck. I spoke to a friend who uses the guitar version of the same product about that and he was mystified. He uses a phaser all the time and indicated than when engaging the mod effect that you actually got a rounder and fuller tone (as tends to happen with real-life effects as well).

I posted a question to the very excellent and helpful Logic Users Group about the problem and someone suggested monitoring the output of the pod running through Logic while I programmed it to cater to what the recording application was actually hearing. So I plugged it in, turned the outputs up all the way and went to work. That did in fact give some better results, but I made the discovery that the amp models vary wildly in their output results. Sure, there is some natural variation, but there is no reason why the output should peak out around -1.2dB for one amp and barely twitch the meters at -18dB on another. A modeler is essentially a synthesizer (not totally accurate, but close enough) and since the output is generated there is no real good reason why the levels should not be somewhat consistent.

So now I was stuck in a situation where I need to hand-cater the tones and still sort of cross my fingers that it would sound ok when I recorded it. Moreover, I also needed to “work around” issues like the “mod effect signal cut”, and was sort of limited to what amp/cabinet combos I could use due to the recording level issue (oddly enough, users of the guitar product report the opposite problem – that the output is too hot and they need to turn it down). I’m trying to finish up some tracking parts for a song to share with a partner now and I’m spending more time sitting around hassling with the tone modeler (and ragging my ears out with headphones) than actually getting any work done. There had to be a better way.

In my travels to find answers, I saw several related problems with the bass products (levels, lack of life, etc), but someone mentioned having really good results with a newer Line 6 product called the TonePort. It’s a very reasonably-priced 24-bit USB recording interface where the amp models and effects live on your computer. The selection of models and effects was quite a bit less (especially for bass) but I figured that I only need a few (it did have some of my favorites) and was worth trying. I also wanted to sort of “reality check” my experience with the Podxt (levels, mod problem, etc) to see if it was “just me” or something flawed with the bass pod.

At first glance, I was pretty pleased with it. The models sounded nice, and unlike with the pod, were in stereo. It also did not suffer from unpredictable effect insert issues – the flangers and phasers gave me a nice full sound when I cut them in. The inline compressor had a gain control on it (unlike the one on my pedalboard) so I could make the overall sound a little stronger and punchier and get better recording levels. The quick-test recording results were better as well. While the levels were not exactly what I wanted, the overall sound was much better and sounded a great deal more “present” in the mix. So far, so good and it was looking like it might have been a reasonable stop-gap recording solution at least to get some stuff laid out.

And then, the problem emerged.

When playing any of the cleaner sounding models or preamps (including some of the unit’s own factory presets) I detected perceptible static-like distortion. Sometimes with a “pop” of static when I hit a string, other times, just a buzzing rattle when I let a string resonate. This is not the sound of improperly set buffer size, signal interference from the monitor, the sound of an overdriven amp, or the sound of clipping (I was no where near hitting the red zone). It was just distortion. I was using it on a G5 so it was not the USB issues that plagued certain PC chipsets (another nifty little issue plaguing that product) and I was nowhere near even making the system sweat. I had updated the controlling software as well to the newest revision. The problem could be re-created on multiple sets of headphones, and multiple guitars (both a Variax and my Warwick) at multiple monitor output levels and in recordings as well. Having dealt with buffer size and sample rate issues in Logic, I checked all that as well.

Some forum questions suggested that the unit might just be broken, but this was really the last straw.

Co-incidentally, Jamie bought me a 4-bus Yamaha mixer for my birthday this weekend and I had discovered the Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI box. In my internet travels looking for answers I got exposed to the “multi-effect box VS. individual effects” debate. Many argue that the quality of the effects in a multi-effects processor just cant stack up against a dedicated effect. I did some listening to some effect pedal samples and sort of agree. I was contemplating another multi-effects board but weighed the pros and cons and realized that a few dedicated high-quality effects that I like to use is probably better than a whole grab-bag of lower quality models. Sure, my new Boss Flanger cost 25% of what I got the pedalboard for, but it’s a much higher quality effect than the two flanger units that came in the pod (and it doesn’t mess up my signal power either). Using the preamp, a couple of effects, and running said into different channels on the mixer, I quickly found I had the variation and tone control I wanted out of the modeler w/out any of the headache and unpredictability (and the lush bonus of true stereo effects as well).

So the TonePort went back to the store and other than the Variax which is a great recording tool, I’m done with the Line 6 stuff. I need to restore the pod to it’s factory presets and sell it. This is a shame because they are a neat company of obvious talented technicians. But they seem to be the textbook case of a company that gets “mixed reviews” – some people really seem to have a lot of luck with their equipment (I understand that their modeling amplifiers are really sweet) and others do not. I was one of the ones that did not. There seems to be a lot of quality control variance across their product line and I’m not sure how a company with that profile gets away with that. Perhaps the TonePort was broken, or maybe the fact that their guitar tech gets much more attention than the related bass tech. I’m not sure. I don’t offer any of this up to engage in the seemingly-popular activity of hating on the company, just to offer up another view of one user’s experience with their products. In the end, for me, going the more traditional route just worked out better.

And now I’ll be able to spend much less time arguing with my rig and more time using it.